She’s spoken before the Secular Coalition for Arizona, and she won an aware from the Center for Inquiry for “Advancement of Science and Reason in Public Policy,” but she avows that she is not an atheist. According to her communications director Justin Unga:

Kyrsten believes the terms non-theist, atheist or nonbeliever are not befitting of her life’s work or personal character. … She does not identify as any of the above.

She does not identify as any of the above, nor does she choose a label to describe what she believes is deeply personal for every individual.

“Not befitting her life’s work or personal character?” Honestly? Clearly, either she or Mr. Unga (or both) think there’s something wrong with being a non-theist, an atheist, or a nonbeliever. Whatever the case may be, it’s clear that she’s not comfortable using a label that would portray her as anything other than a god-believer.

She does exhibit an attitude toward governance that I find (mostly) commendable:

Though Sinema was raised in a religious household, she draws her policymaking decisions from her experience as a social worker who worked with diverse communities and as a lawmaker who represented hundreds of thousands. Sinema is a student of all cultures in her community and has learned that responsible stewards must consider all faiths with respect and dignity. She believes that a secular approach is the best way to achieve this in good government.

That last sentence? That’s what separation of church and state is all about.

Regardless, this leaves atheists without an openly nonbelieving representative. That’s troubling, especially when we see people like Paul Broun – a man who said that evolution, embryology, and the big bang theory were “lies straight from the pit of hell,” meant to tell people they don’t need a savior – winding up on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. Combined with President Obama’s re-election, the Religious Right is sure to be whipped into a furor over the next four years. It could make for interesting and distressing times.

Get all the political slogans out of the way. Get rid of the hot-button issues that push our emotional buttons and keep us from looking at the deeper long-term problems. Get to the core of it all, and I think most Americans agree that we’re in a bad situation and we need to find a way to get out of it. We may disagree about the fundamentals of how to do that, but that doesn’t make the other side evil.

We’re all human beings. We’re all flawed. We’re all often quite wrong, even if we’re too stubborn to admit it. And we all have ideas to bring to the table.

Somehow, compromise has become a dirty word in American politics. Those at either of the extreme ends of the liberal/conservative spectrum have painted the other side as evil, bigoted, hate-filled, know-nothings.

I’m a liberal. My heart is constantly bleeding, and I’m not ashamed of it. But this doesn’t mean that I think everyone who disagrees with me is the scum of the earth. It means that I have a set of values that differs from those of other people. When I discuss important issues with conservatives, I can understand how their positions derive from their values. We may disagree, but I don’t think they’re (necessarily) irrational or small-minded simply for disagreeing with me.

At the risk of sounding self-righteous, I think that this is the sort of attitude that our current political dialogue sorely needs. The polarity of our parties is not only hurting political discourse in our country; it’s pushing people further and further to the ends of the spectrum, and that can only have dire consequences for our future.

If this democratic republic is to long survive, we must return to a place where we can stop trying to prove how liberal or conservative we all are, and instead focus on how each one of us, as Americans, can help us come together to restore our faded greatness to what it once was. For better or for worse, we are the descendants of a nation of rebels who overturned the most powerful empire the world had seen in centuries. Our forefathers foresaw many of the challenges we’ve faced thus far, but they had faith that those who followed them would maintain a healthy body politic with a genuine interest in the affairs of state, and in doing so would keep the principle of freedom alive. We owe it to them, and to all who have fought and died for this ideal, to give our all toward keeping the American political system vital, focused, motivated, and sane.

Early last month, PZ Myers over at Pharyngula posted a link to a survey by a radical anti-gay group (maybe it’s just a single person? I can’t tell) asking silly questions about whether the government should force companies to hire gay people, and things like that. To fill out the survey, you had to enter an e-mail address, so I put in one of my throwaway ones in the hope that I’d get some entertainment out of the things they send to their mailing list.

We can always count on Republican politicians to give us clarity! Today, the GOP presidential candidates (sans Rick Perry, who was apparently off fighting wildfires) met in South Carolina to hold a forum where they shared their views on various subjects. Newt Gingrich said something that has had remarkably little coverage in the mainstream press, save for this one story:

At a GOP candidates’ forum in South Carolina, Gingrich maintained that everyone, especially a president, needs God’s help in “a world where evil always lurks.” He added that someone who faces serious issues without praying “would be a person who totally misunderstood the nature of life and who would be dangerous holding a major office.”

Apparently, it’s still okay to say stuff like this about atheists. Well, then, I guess we can just ignore Article 6, Paragraph 3 of the Constitution!

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.

Good to know you can disregard the Constitution as much as you like and still be considered a serious candidate so long as you believe in a god.

The New York state Senate is currently mulling over a bill to legalize gay marriage in New York, finally bringing marriage equality to one of the most famously liberal states in America. There’s just one little nit to pick first: religious groups, like the Catholic church, are insisting that lawmakers write exemptions into the law allowing them to refuse to perform marriage ceremonies for same-sex couples.

I say we should give them what they want.

Despite the stereotype of hard-core conservative Catholicism, recent polling shows that as many as 43% of American Catholics support the rights of same-sex couples to marry, with another 31% supporting civil unions that are equal in all but name. Imagine nearly half of the Catholic population suddenly being legally at odds with their own church. This organization that they’ve made such a central part of their identity suddenly becomes a caricature of itself, sticking dogmatically to old, hateful moral ideas they’ve long since discarded.

And it’s not just the Catholics. Part of what keeps people in organized religions is the idea that they’re a part of some great force of moral authority. Hundreds of thousands of liberal Christians officially ally themselves with anti-gay groups without even recognizing it. But when a gay Christian couple approaches their church to ask them to perform a marriage ceremony, only to find themselves tossed aside as immoral garbage because of the bigoted teachings of the larger church, they’ll become disillusioned with the body of the church and may start to question the claims of authority it makes on other issues.

So as I said before, let the bigoted religious groups refuse to perform marriage ceremonies. It’ll be a good way to sort out the hateful fools from the more reasonable folks, and it’ll push people to leave organized religions and thus force church officials to come to grips with just how out of touch they are with the rest of humanity.

I have a bat habit of thinking of random things to blog about, but never actually blogging about them. In the interest of getting those thoughts out to the world, I’m beginning a series I’ll call “Weekend Ruminations,” where I’ll blog about random things that popped into my head throughout the week that I wanted to briefly talk about.

ITEM THE FIRST:

While I was at Target yesterday, I noticed a couple with a pre-teen son in the checkout line with a board game-size box labeled “Creationary.” Instantly, I began wondering whether it was related to creationism, and why Target would be selling something like that. As it turns out, it’s really a sort of Lego Pictionary, where the player picks a category, builds something in that category, and challenges others to guess what it is.

Nevertheless, this got me thinking: there has to be a whole industry out there full of companies that do nothing but make toys for the children of fundamentalist Christians. Back when I was a hardcore believer, I played a collectible card game called Redemption – sort of a Magic: The Gathering for bible-thumpers. It’s made by a company that also makes Bible Taboo, Apples to Apples: Bible Edition, and dozens of other Christianized versions of of otherwise secular games. This leads me to wonder: which companies that I frequently buy from are spending some of that money to promote nonsense like this? I know all about companies like Chic-Fil-A, but who else is getting rich off of lying to children?

ITEM THE SECOND:

I’m originally from a smallish town in Michigan. Lately, some pretty scary stuff has been going down in Michigan; i.e., the Republican-led state government has instituted a policy which allows an “emergency” financial manager to fire elected officials and abolish the charter of a town as is deemed necessary. This policy has existed in a much more limited form for a long time; essentially, the financial manager could step in to solve a city’s budget crisis and would then leave. Now, the party of small, decentralized government is doing its best to promote taxation without representation and use the power of a centralized government to strong-arm city governments to its will.

First target: Benton Harbor, a poor, majority African American city. This city is being targeted by a land developer who wants to take over the public beach and turn it into part of a country club where the annual membership fee is about half of the average annual income of $10,000. The law which expanded the powers of the financial planner was sponsored in the Michigan House of Representatives by the Representative for Benton Harbor.

(Well… sort of. It may be the case that Rachel Maddow, as seen in the clip above, is excluding a few key facts about the story. But even with the corrections I just linked to, the real story is still crazy.)

ITEM THE THIRD:

It’s Easter, a holiday you may know as Ostara, or the Festival of the Goddess Ēostre, or any of a number of other Pagan or Egyptian festivals noting the return of spring and the associated celebration of fertility. Christians celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, an event which… well, to put it bluntly, isn’t supported by any contemporary accounts from outside of the Bible, and which was apparently accompanied by events which damn well should have been noticed by some historian or another. Funny that the Jerusalem Zombie Invasion somehow evaded notice.